Hacker News Reader

A file system that can eat your data is broken. If a feature is not ready for public consumption, it should not be built-in in the first place.

View on HN

Then every filesystem is broken by that definition. You're setting an impossible standard given how non-specialist software is developed.

Here's a list of failures from zfs, including many kernel panics for example https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/labels/Type%3A%20Defect - is it broken and shouldn't have been released?

Fine, let's be more nuanced: no filesystem should lose data if FAT16/FAT32/NTFS 3.1/EXT2/EXT3 wouldn't.

well, FAT16/FAT32/EXT2 are not journalled, so making them lose data in a giant variety of ways is a trivial affair. You might want a higher bar than that.

That's the point: if file systems that basic would NOT lose data, then it is unacceptable if another file system does.

Maybe to put it differently: new file systems should offer improvements wrt reliability for stable features of the file systems of the previous generation; regressions are unacceptable.

Yeah, when you get down to it the opinion really boils down to "the file system is broken iff it doesn't lose data for the use-cases I personally use it for."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com